Question: What’s blue, white and green, and decidedly unpopular? Answer: The Vancouver Canucks’ new hockey jersey.

Immediate fan reaction to the newly redesigned home and away uniforms — featuring the team’s original colours, the old hockey stick logo on the shoulders, a leaping killer whale and “Vancouver” spelled out on the front — ranged from disappointed to flat-out negative.

Katie Stein Sather of Coquitlam thought the colours were great, but “it all looks so square, so much like it’s standing still. Where’s the movement and speed that a hockey team needs?”

In Vancouver, Melissa Fong called the new look “an unnecessary change.”

“It looks almost exactly the same as the old orca jersey. I thought new uniforms were meant to ‘revamp’ the team with a refreshing winning spirit,” she wrote in The Vancouver Sun’s online reader response forum.

Errol N. Hannigan of Kelowna said he was unimpressed. “A uniform may have some degree of influence on how the wearer performs on the ice and if so . . . the unveiling of the fifth consecutive bad and unimaginative team jersey probably means another bad and unimaginative team will be wearing it,” he wrote.

John Carter, meanwhile, a graphic design instructor at Douglas College, called the redesign an “utter disappointment” and “the tawdriest type of cut-and-paste job.”

“Effective design requires clarity of purpose and visual unity, both of which are evidently lacking here,” he wrote.

Ouch. That likely wasn’t the reaction the team was looking for today when it unveiled the jersey — which will retail at $135.99, according to the Canucks’ website — in front of 6,000 excited fans at GM Place.

Chris Zimmerman, Canucks president and chief executive, said a lot of thought and market research went into the redesign, which is meant to reflect “who we are and the connection to the community.”

“Really, as I thought about this the last few days, the word ‘pride’ is what’s most important. People’s connection to this team is so deep, and in the end, that’s what it’s about,” Zimmerman told the crowd at the unveiling.

Tatsuya Nakagawa, president of the Vancouver-based sports marketing firm Atomica, said negative public reaction to a new look or logo associated with a favourite team is not unusual, adding that fans may just need time to get used to it.

But, even if they don’t, it likely won’t make a difference to the team’s bottom line. Ultimately, people will still buy into the new look, he predicted, pointing to Buffalo, N.Y. as a recent example.

There, some 30,000 disgruntled Sabre fans signed a petition in protest of that team’s new logo for the 2006-07 season, and threatened to boycott any merchandise bearing its likeness.

“The logo resembles neither a buffalo nor a sabre. It has been compared to numerous unflattering things, from a hairpiece to a slug,” the petition stated.

“With so much negativity, you’d think jersey sales would tank,” said Nakagawa. “But during the initial week or so, sales were up 900 per cent.”

Time will tell if the Canucks will reap similar success, Nakagawa said. As for those unhappy fans?

“At the end of the day, if the team is performing, it doesn’t quite matter what logo they are wearing,” he said.

dahansen@png.canwest.com with a file from Iain MacIntyre